


Occupational Hazard (Let's Do Lunch)

by theianitor



Category: Formula 1 RPF
Genre: Exes, Falling In Love, Idiots in Love, M/M, Office, very light angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-11
Updated: 2019-10-11
Packaged: 2020-12-07 21:15:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20982479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theianitor/pseuds/theianitor
Summary: Seb has long-since stopped trying to mentally prepare what to say to Kimi when they see each other at work. It always ends with him managing to jumble the words anyway, and awkwardly mumbling for a bit before hurrying on. Kimi, to his credit, still speaks to him like he's a normal enough human being though.





	Occupational Hazard (Let's Do Lunch)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [paradox_of_retaliation](https://archiveofourown.org/users/paradox_of_retaliation/gifts).

> This is a birthday gift for the lovely Paradox_of_retaliation. <3 You're great, you know it, and thanks for putting up with my silly questions and rambling about fic at any and all hours. I started this for you a good while back, so thanks for having a birthday and kicking my ass into gear! XD

It was as quiet as ever on the 11th floor when Sebastian grabbed the stack of folders and made his way toward the elevator. It would have been easy enough to get some newbie to do the Monday morning run, but he preferred doing it himself. In part because the managers of the departments _noticed_, and since he wanted to get a permanent contract their noticing was a good thing. Also, it was the easiest way to ensure the run was done correctly. But it also gave him a chance to hang out with the guys in production for a little while.

The doors opened to another office landscape already buzzing with activity. The production department did most of their office-bound work at the beginning of the week, and then sped off to whatever businesses they were handling. That was in part why Sebastian liked them. Their work seemed a bit more hands-on and real than just pushing numbers.

“Got anything for me in there?”

Sebastian grinned and held his folders out so Jenson could pick off the top three ones. He always sorted them so Jenson’s were on top; he was the only one who always came over to meet Seb at the elevators. One of the folders made him groan out loud.

“Bad news?” Seb asked, sneaking a glance at the company name.

“No no, the overtime is great,” he grumbled. “Hope I can push this off on one of the new guys, it’s a great introduction to client-who-keeps-changing-things-we-already-agreed-on...”

Laughing, Seb continued down the row of cubicles.

“Make sure to give someone else a headache too, okay?” Jenson called after him, waving the offending folder.

“If you have any good files, I’ll take those?” Heikki rolled his chair out of his cubicle and accepted the folders marked ‘Kovalainen’.

“These aren’t good,” he complained, throwing one onto his desk and opening the other, apparently more important one, to get started with it. “If you’re only giving out shit today, maybe you should skip Kimi completely.”

“Are we going for drinks on Friday?” Seb asked. Heikki and Kimi shared an apartment, and they were part of a handful of guys that usually went out to a nearby bar to lament or celebrate the week gone by.

“If you keep handing out shit like this you are going to have to buy us all drinks on Friday,” Heikki said, pulling the chair in the last bit toward the computer and setting to work. Sebastian looked down at his remaining folders. Two of them were for Kimi.

Allowing himself a short pause for a deep breath and running a hand through his hair, Seb turned the corner to the end cubicle.

“Hey Kimi,” he said, picking off the folders and holding them out. Kimi typed out something on his screen and then swiveled his chair around.

“Hi Seb,” he said, accepting his files.

“Sorry if it’s bad stuff,” Seb said, leaning back against the edge of Kimi’s desk. Kimi looked at him curiously. “Everyone else seems to have gotten more to do...”

As usual, being around Kimi made him feel a little jittery. He had long-since stopped trying to mentally prepare what to say as he always managed to jumble the words anyway and ended up awkwardly mumbling his way through for a bit before leaving. Kimi, to his credit, still spoke to him like he was a normal enough human being. In fact, as others liked to remind him, Seb was one of the few people in the office Kimi actually spoke to for any length of time.

“You always bring the work assignments so there is always more to do when you come,” Kimi said. If he hadn’t been smiling a little, Sebastian would have thought he was annoyed with him. “You should start bringing some other kind of mail and people would be more happy.”

“What, like love letters?”

Sebastian laughed for a second before his mind caught up with what his mouth had said.

“Maybe,” Kimi said, his smile getting a little bigger. Sebastian, feeling the heat rising in his cheeks, stuttered out an excuse and left. In his flustered state he completely missed Heikki laughing at something from inside his cubicle, and Jenson chuckling to himself over by the coffee machine.

\--

As soon as he was back in his own cubicle, flipping the pages of his files without taking in a single word, Sebastian started feeling like he should have stayed. Kimi hadn’t said anything to ridicule him... in fact, hadn’t he looked kind of happy that Seb was there? It was much easier to talk to Kimi on Fridays when they’d both had a few beers.

The cellphone was warm in his hand now. He’d been poking the screen on repeatedly, trying to figure out a good way of asking if Kimi wanted to get lunch. Over the course of knowing him, Seb must have typed out similar messages a dozen times. He’d never sent a single one.

It seemed like a perfect excuse though. A lunch could be an apology for running off, but also a great opportunity to finally do something alone with Kimi, no other friends or co-workers around, and no official work-business to interfere. Almost like a date. Not quite, but almost.

_“Do you want to get lunch? My treat.”_

Sebastian sent the message before he could think about it for too long and change his mind. Then he started trying to read his file again, but he kept looking back at his phone so often it made the letters blur together on the page. When the phone finally buzzed into life he snatched it up so quickly he almost knocked his mouse off the desk.

_“Late meeting come down”_

There was something in the way Kimi wrote that made it very easy to read it in his voice. Sebastian read the message a few times over and then determinedly put his phone in his pocket, as to not be tempted to look at it more. He got on with updating a few accounts and when lunch was five minutes away, he sneaked off for the elevators and went down to production.

Everyone in the room was over by the production’s manager’s door, and Seb quietly made his way over to where he saw Heikki and Kimi standing. The manager, Mr. Wolff, was making a little spiel of presenting the transferring staff member who seemed to be doing some sort of training in the production department before moving upstairs. Sebastian caught the words “moving into management” and stood on tip-toes to get a glance of him.

He was blond, with a trendy haircut that made him look casually styled, and it looked like he had spent a good deal on clothes. The guys in production were usually pretty relaxed when it came to dress code, but the blond was looking very neat in a light blue blazer and white shirt. Perhaps he’d dressed up for the occasion, or this was an effort to distance himself from the rest of them, since he was moving ‘up’ to management. Sebastian caught the name “Nico”. Then Heikki whispered something to Kimi, who was standing so close by that Seb could hear him quite clearly.

“Isn’t that the piece of ass you stayed with in Germany?”

For a second it was as though Seb couldn’t understand English. Heikki was grinning like something was very funny, and Kimi was giving him a cold glare.

“Shut up,” he said, barely opening his mouth.

“What? I’m not blaming you, he’s _hot_,” Heikki hissed, looking Nico up and down.

Seb turned back to look at Nico again. He’d heard something about it before, he suddenly remembered. The guys had been making jokes about it when Kimi came back from Germany, how he’d apparently charmed the German office liaison he’d been staying with. But that had been left in Germany, so Seb hadn’t cared much. Kimi had just shrugged and seemed almost embarrassed to talk about it anyway. But here he was, this _Nico_, and he was even prettier than Seb had imagined him.

Without really thinking about it Seb sunk back down onto his feet and turned around to leave.

“Are you ready to go?”

Kimi’s voice made him turn back around, but it almost made his face hurt to fake the apologetic smile.

“I... eh... no. Jenson needs me to...” he waved his phone lamely. “Yeah.” His shoulders sank and he felt weighted down.

Kimi didn’t say anything but his brows knitted for a second, and then he frowned.

“Okay.”

“Yeah,” Seb said again, and walked back to the elevator. He spent the rest of his day blindly working through files, feeling like an absolute coward.

\--

The week dragged on and Sebastian focused as much as he could on his work and nothing else. Nothing at all else, especially not _Nico_ who had not only been brought up to the 11th floor by Toto to say hi to the upstairs team as well, and who seemed perfectly polite and professional when he shook hands and greeted everyone. He had been _delighted_ that Seb was from Germany, and instantly switched to German for a little while, catching Seb off guard, making him stumble his way through a few phrases of his own native tongue.

He found a petty kind of satisfaction in the fact that while he may have stuttered a bit, Nico’s German still bore an accent. He couldn’t place it, but at least it was something. A small flaw with the otherwise well-groomed and attractive young man, but still one he felt rather guilty about savoring.

It was easy to blame work for not having time to go to lunch with Kimi, but his preoccupation meant he felt no joy that his colleague had even _asked_. It didn’t become a problem until...

“So are you actually buying me that beer? Because I have had a proper _week_.” Jenson sat down in Sebastian’s visitor’s chair and sighed dramatically. “Come on,” he added at the look on Seb’s face. “It’s Friday.”

Seb was just about to make up another excuse, but going out with the guys was something he’d actually been looking forward to. Before he could overthink it, he nodded.

“I’ll buy you a beer, and you can buy me one,” he said, and when Jenson gave him a snort at the long-running joke that while they were all really buying their own drinks, they were buying each other drinks in a never-ending return of favors, he felt his face crack into the first honest smile he’d worn in a good couple of days.

Most of the guys didn’t waste the time in going home to change before they went out to Massa’s, which was just down the street from the office. It was a friendly pub which never really got too loud or wild – other than when Brazil played football. The owner was an avid fan but only ever showed the international cup games on the one big screen TV, and only ever had specials or decorations up when Brazil were playing.

The owner, stood behind the bar as always, greeted them warmly and started pouring two beers as soon as they had come in the door. Sebastian couldn’t help but smile. This was as it should be. More and more of their co-workers trickled in, and while Jenson’s story about client-who-keeps-changing-things-we-already-agreed-on took two beers to get through, Sebastian felt comfortable, laughing and joking along.

“Sorry we’re late!”

Heikki’s voice cut through the hum of conversation and laughter, and most people waved or said hi and then returned to their conversations. Sebastian, however, was left sitting with his beer half-raised, staring. Heikki had come in with Kimi, and trailing behind them was Nico.

“He’s very easy on the eyes, isn’t he?”

Sebastian shook his head and looked over. Jenson had followed his gaze and had a little smile on his face as he watched the two Finns going over to the bar, Nico still following them like he was lost.

“What?”

“He is...” Jenson was about to repeat what he’d said when he looked over to Seb and narrowed his eyes. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Seb said much too quickly.

In all honesty, everything was wrong. Nico and Kimi had history, and now Nico had come here, probably positioned himself in the company to be moved here, for Kimi. He had fought to get rid of the distance, which had of course been the end of their relationship before, and now he was where he needed to be to get Kimi back. It proved intent, capability, bravery... Sebastian sighed. Who was he kidding? It had taken him ages to work up the courage to ask Kimi to lunch. He had _nothing_ on Nico Rosberg.

Jenson was still looking at him suspiciously, and then glanced over to the bar again.

“You’ve been a bit off color all week,” he said conversationally. “Is it about Nico?”

“What? No,” Sebastian said, casting around for an excuse. “It’s... eh... nothing.”

Jenson nodded slowly.

“I mean he _is_ distracting.”

“I guess,” Sebastian agreed, not looking up. The words felt sour in his mouth, and he tried to wash the taste away by taking a drink.

“I’m going to go see if he needs some help understanding our English drink menus,” Jenson said, finishing his drink and standing up. He looked like he’d only just decided, and Sebastian, despite the dark cloud hanging over his thoughts, couldn’t help but admire his friend’s determination. It felt like the right time to warn Jenson off though, if he didn’t want to get his heart broken too.

“Don’t bother,” Seb said quietly.

“What? Why not?”

“He’s with Kimi.” If the words had been sour before, they felt like acid now.

“Is he?” Jenson said, blinking.

Sebastian, ignoring him, decided to use some determination of his own.

“I’m just going to go home, I’ll see you Monday.” He picked up his jacket and left before Jenson could argue, missing the surprised look on his friend’s face and also the stunned and disappointed gaze that followed him from Kimi, over by the bar.

On Saturday morning Sebastian felt like re-heated crap. He’d gone home and had a small glass of whiskey, and while it hadn’t been enough to make him hung over, it had also not been enough to let him forget about the night before. He decided to start actively forgetting about things tomorrow, wrapping his covers around himself and padding out to the livingroom. A single day spent feeling sorry for yourself on the couch could be forgiven.

He had settled in comfortably with some mineral water and fruit for a late breakfast when the doorbell rang. Grumbling, he shuffled through the apartment still wrapped in his covers; if he faked being sick, any kind of salesperson would probably leave him alone soon enough.

“I’m sorry, I...” the words died in his throat as he peered out through the crack in the door and found Kimi standing there.

“Are you okay?” Kimi’s eyes widened at the sight of him. A second ago he had looked nervous, now he seemed surprised and worried.

“Yeah, I... eh... yes?” Seb said. In his surprise he couldn’t think of anything to say, but instead opened the door a little further to let Kimi in. He was already over the threshold when Seb realized how incredibly stupid it was to invite him in.

“Are you sick or something?” Kimi said, removing his shoes and looking around. “Nice place.”

“Thanks, I...” Sebastian sighed. “No, I’m not sick, I was just...”

“Relaxing a bit?”

“Yeah.”

They were left standing in the hall, both looking around like everything in the little room was more intriguing than the other person. Kimi fiddled with his jacket. Seb wrapped the covers a little more tightly around himself. He didn’t feel cold despite wearing only a t-shirt and boxers underneath, but standing here opposite a fully dressed Kimi, he felt a bit naked.

“Do you want to come in?” Seb finally said, completely needlessly, seeing as Kimi was already inside. He made a gesture towards the livingroom where the TV was still chattering away.

“Sure, yeah,” Kimi said, and followed him through to the couch. They both sat down, leaving one cushions-worth of distance between them. It got quiet again, but the TV jabbered on. Sebastian could barely hear it, his eyes fixed on the wall behind the television, trying desperately to think of something to say. Beside him, Kimi was still fiddling with his jacket, his eyes on the little coffee table.

“Listen I...” Seb started.

“Seb I just...” Kimi said at exactly the same time. They looked at each other.

“You first,” Seb said, looking away quickly, feeling the heat rise in his cheeks. For a moment he couldn’t remember how he’d ended up in this situation, or indeed on this couch, or even that they were actually in _his_ apartment.

“No I’ll go first,” Kimi said, and then smiled a little when he registered what Seb had said.

“I just came to say that I...” He seemed to lose his train of thought, and took a deep breath to get back to it. “I came to say that I really wanted to have that lunch with you.”

Sebastian looked up quickly. “You did?”

“Yeah. I still do, if you still want, you know.”

“I...” Sebastian was on the verge of saying he’d love to, but then remembered the very attractive little problem with that. “Is Nico okay with that then?”

“What?”

“Nico,” he repeated.

Kimi looked confused. “I don’t understand what Nico has to do with you and me going out for lunch?”

Sebastian rather thought his face must mirror Kimi’s now, feeling as though the conversation had suddenly turned into an equation he couldn’t solve.

“You... you and Nico,” he said, hoping Kimi would understand. He wasn’t sure he could explain it any better, because at the thought of the pretty blond his mouth had gotten that sour taste again.

“Oh yeah,” Kimi said, as if he’d only just remembered. “Yeah Jenson said you thought that, but...

“Jenson?!”

“Yeah we talked at the pub and he said you’d been feeling down and that he thought it had to do with me and Nico.”

Sebastian cursed inwardly. Fuck the English blabbermouth bastard, and fuck Kimi and his straightforward Finnish nature.

“But there is nothing going on with me and Nico and I thought I should tell you that.”

The air left Sebastian’s lungs in one long, almost whistling breath.

“But...” he said, not quite sure where to start. “But Germany?”

Kimi didn’t even flinch at the mention of it, and shrugged noncommittally. “That was a long time ago and it wasn’t...” his very blue eyes met Sebastian’s for a second before he looked down again. “It wasn’t really anything.”

“You and Nico aren’t..?”

“No.”

“But you really want to go to lunch with me... now?”

“Now if you want but we could go on Monday or when you want.” Kimi shrugged again and now that Sebastian dared look at him, properly look at him, he thought he saw a hint of pink in his cheeks.

“Just...” Sebastian took all the determination he had and put it in his next few words. “Just lunch?”

“Or dinner if you want,” Kimi said, meeting Seb’s eye now. His lips curled into the smallest of smiles. “A lot of dinners if you want.”

Without thinking about it too much, Seb scooted a little closer on the empty cushion between them. He didn’t know how much Kimi might have been thinking when he copied the motion, making them meet half-way. Still feeling jittery, he reached out and took Kimi’s hand, intertwining their fingers.

\--

The next Monday, Sebastian went to grab the folders to do the morning run again. He felt lighter, smiling at the people he met, wishing them good morning as they passed. His happiness was the kind that spread, and people returned his smile and greeting, some surprised, but all happy to see him. He sorted Jenson’s folders to the top and headed for the elevator, humming to himself.

“Morning.”

The greeting almost made him lose hold of his folders, and Kimi chuckled at the shocked look on his face.

“I just wanted to say hello before you came up,” he admitted, giving Seb a second to gather up his folders as the door closed.

When the doors opened again, Kimi wandered off toward his cubicle, humming a tune as he went. Behind him, Sebastian emerged with his armful of folders, looking slightly ruffled and red-cheeked, looking forward to the work week like he never had before.

\- The End -

**Author's Note:**

> All in good fun, as per usual! :)  
Thanks for the read! <3


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